{"id":4548,"date":"2010-08-29T07:53:59","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T12:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=4548"},"modified":"2010-08-29T07:53:59","modified_gmt":"2010-08-29T12:53:59","slug":"building-a-nation-of-know-nothings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/08\/29\/building-a-nation-of-know-nothings\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The article <a title=\"Timothy Egan article\" href=\"http:\/\/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com\/2010\/08\/25\/building-a-nation-of-know-nothings\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Building a Nation of Know-Nothings<\/strong><\/a> by Timothy Egan is a partial explanation of what my political blog is trying to fight.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><strong>SPOILER ALERT<\/strong><\/span>: The quotes below give away the punchline to the article.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren\u2019t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?<\/p>\n<p>But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The article Building a Nation of Know-Nothings by Timothy Egan is a partial explanation of what my political blog is trying to fight. SPOILER ALERT: The quotes below give away the punchline to the article. It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4548","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4549,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548\/revisions\/4549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}